by Walter Chaw Outrageously influential and utterly unlike its contemporaries, Fred Wilcox's Forbidden Planet
today suffers from prosaic pacing and long stretches where its
groundbreaking special effects take centre-stage as the cast gapes in
slack-jawed, dim-witted appreciation. I suppose it's not altogether
antithetical to the themes of the picture, one that finds its heroes
pontificating on their primitiveness in the face of an awesome (and
extinct) alien culture--but this open love of its own coolness
ultimately represents Forbidden Planet's broadest, most
negative impact. The worst of our mainstream spectaculars, after all,
are buried under reaction shots as the characters who should be the
least mesmerized by their surroundings are impelled to be audience
surrogates. What still works about Forbidden Planet is its
high-mindedness: those moments where mad scientist Morbius (Walter
Pidgeon) declares that the knowledge gleaned from the new technologies
he discovers by reverse-engineering a cache of alien artifacts will be
jealously rationed by him alone. The dangerous idea that one entity
would take on the moral and intellectual superiority to judge who
should and should not be allowed to educate themselves was germane here
in the middle of the Cold War and remains applicable to our current
state of foreign affairs, where just the threat of knowledge acts
simultaneously as a spur to aggression and as a deterrent for invasion.
Considered by many to be the best of the '50s science-fiction cycle, Forbidden Planet,
at once Luddite and in love with the potential for technological
expansion, is at least unique for its unabashed indulgence in its
subtext--though mining subtext tends to have the obvious effect of
leaving the subtext barren.

A crew of earthmen, led by intrepid
Commander John Adams (Leslie Nielsen--his character named after our
(still) most progressive President), lands on distant Altair IV to
investigate the disappearance of colonial ship Bellerophon (so named
for the Greek hero who tamed Pegasus to kill the Chimera), only to
learn that the lone survivors are gasbag Morbius and his comely
daughter Alta (Anne Francis). (It's the wellspring for James Cameron's
classic Aliens, which also begins with a rescue mission to a
planet missing its colonists; other similarities include the discovery
of a sole survivor, a girl child, and a planet infested with what in
this case is literally the manifestation of a nightmare.) Steeped in
the pop Freudianism that marked great swaths of Fifties culture, Forbidden Planet
suggests that the bogey on this island Altair is the unexamined Id
aspect of Freud's diagram of the unconscious. We can go as far as our
brains will take us, and paradoxically only as far as our balls will
let us. The Bellerophon story ends like most myths of antiquity end:
with the hubris of the hero, inescapable, misleading him into the
belief that it's possible to exceed the bestial in the pursuit of the
celestial.

If this use of myth is
more Jungian than Freudian, what is unmistakably Freudian is the
picture's first hour, obsessed as it is with Adams's men trying, to
various degrees of failure, to seduce/rape young Alta. (A sequence
where amorous Lt. Farman (Warren Stevens) attempts to arouse her by
kissing her forcefully is particularly loathsome.) When Alta finally
chooses a male counterpart whose advances are, it's suggested,
physically welcome (the Commander's, naturally), a pet tiger,
previously tame, suddenly attacks--and in this way, the film ejects its
denizens from Eden. Forbidden Planet structures itself, too, on
Shakespeare's "The Tempest", in which a sorcerer is exiled to an
enchanted island where he plots revenge, raises his daughter, and gains
the counsel of spirit Ariel and beast Caliban. The spirit in the
picture is instant cult hero Robby, the Robot; the beast is the Id
creature, brought to life by a Disney animator on loan. The rest, the
essence of "The Tempest"'s cautionary tale of absolute power and the
cold comfort of vengeance, is folded into Shakespeare's remarkable
anthropological cant: like "The Tempest", Forbidden Planet is a marriage of head and heart--the things that drive the mind and the things that corrupt the body. It recalls Wolf Rilla's Village of the Damned
in its pushing of the message--embedded in any tale of ambition--that
it's impossible to disregard our humanity in the pursuit of
technology--that to even attempt to do so is something we do at our
great peril. At its heart, Forbidden Planet suffers a bit from
its own ambition: in aspiring to be the final word on didactic genre
proselytizing, it becomes more polemic than passion play. As it
happens, its most interesting moments are mired in human frailty--in
sex, death, betrayal, jealousy, and intoxication.

The
main attraction in a lot of ways, Robby adheres to Asimov's laws of
robotics (his inability to harm a human provides the picture with its
primary plot twist), demonstrates Gort's fearsome physical power, and
fast became every boy's dream of a best friend. Enough so that he
inspired The Invisible Boy, a franchise non-starter that pairs him with a little boy to save the world, Iron Giant-style. The Invisible Boy
is representative of the cynical cash-in mentality, prevalent in every
moment along the way in cinema's brief, filthy-lucre-driven history.
With Robby having cost upwards of a hundred grand to make (and having
stolen the show handily in a respected space oater that didn't do quite
as well as hoped), what better than to get that film's screenwriter
(Cyril Hume) to knock off a pre-teen adventure starring Robby as
Lassie. Insufferable kid Timmie (Richard Eyer) uncovers a Robby kit in
his dad's garage and, with the help of a quick run through the smart
ray courtesy evil supercomputer Univac (can Cameron's Terminator Skynet bogey also be traced back to this source?), gets it operational so that Robby can, in turn, be Univac's lapdog.

The ultimate, Invaders from Mars-like
plan is to implant microchips in the world's leaders, thus enabling
Univac to rule the planet from outer space--a nod to Sputnik anxiety.
(Indeed, the only fun of the piece is in considering how its premise
informs the era.) We hold down the fast forward button as, in lieu of
real thought or budget, the picture spends great chunks of time just
talking to hear itself speak. In declaring it ripe for the MST3K
treatment, I'm really saying that if you don't like movies, you might
have a good time going after this one for obviously being someone's
afterthought and cash-grab aimed at our most gullible demographic. At
90 minutes, it plays like something twice that length. Ditto an episode
of the "Thin Man" television series--itself spun off from the venerable
movie franchise and starring Kennedy kin/Rat-Packer Peter Lawford as
indefatigable high society gumshoe/lush Nick Charles--that shoehorns
Robby into a screwball scenario in which our irrepressible sleuths are
enlisted in some stupid mystery involving our irrepressible robot.
Warning: Shark Jumping.

THE DVDAside from presenting Forbidden Planet
in a sparkling, if curiously brown, 2.42:1 anamorphic widescreen
remaster that preserves the production's CinemaScope grandeur (and in a
DD 5.1 remix that respects the picture's stereo origins), the first
disc of Warner's splashy 50th Anniversary DVD of the film
sports about thirteen minutes of deleted scenes (un-restored and
inconsequential) as well as 10 minutes of "lost footage" that
essentially amounts to test footage. An "MGM Parade" reel (6 mins.),
meantime, zeroes in on iconic Robbie and Morbius, while a series of
trailers plus the abovementioned "Thin Man" episode round out the
platter.

The second disc features, in addition to The Invisible Boy
in a less pristine transfer (detail and contrast are exquisite, but the
source print has seen better days), three short featurettes. The first,
"Watch the Skies!" (55 mins.), is TCM's tribute to the sci-fi of the Fifties, wherein talking-heads like Spielberg and Lucas go on about how
much these films, Forbidden Planet especially, influenced their
own sagas. Spielberg's recollection of a particular lost Jack Arnold
classic prompted me to do a bootleg search; why Arnold hasn't received
a collection all his own is one of the great mysteries--and
injustices--of the DVD archive era. "Amazing! Exploring the Far Reaches
of Forbidden Planet" (24 mins.) interviews the likes of John
Carpenter in addition to surviving cast members to reflect on how great
is the eponymous film. In the best parts of the piece, Bebe Barron--one
half of the revolutionary scoring team--explains how she and husband
Louis literally invented whole cloth the basis for synthesized,
electronic music for film. I liked, especially, Carpenter (himself
responsible for a couple of iconic synth scores) opining
enthusiastically about the innovative music. Then there's "Robby the
Robot: Engineering a Sci-Fi Icon" (12 mins.), which does the fanboy
thing for the robot. Maybe it's me and my jaded, asshole, post-modern
man thing, but Robby never looked anything like a robot to me--just a
short guy in a stubby suit. I'm not talking this viewing, though, I'm
talking when I first saw Forbidden Planet at age eight. To each his own. Originally published: December 19, 2007.

THE BLU-RAY DISCby Bill Chambers As part of an implicit sci-fi promotion, Warner brings Forbidden Planet
to Blu-ray in an exquisite 2.40:1, 1080p transfer. The film has a
pastel (then "otherworldly") palette that can look lifeless and even
sickly under the wrong conditions, but HiDef brings out a real
photochemical vibrancy and subtlety to the colours, in addition to
wringing lots of supple detail out of the monochromatic wardrobe
choices. There's an elegant scrim of grain over the image that
disappears during many optical effects, suggesting the studio
noise-reduced those shots to avoid the opposite outcome of grain
spiking to distraction. A telltale smeariness remains in these
instances, however, that I found no less jarring. Still, I doubt Forbidden Planet will ever look or
sound more refined than this on home video, with the film's discrete
but largely hemispheric four-track mix impeccably converted to lossless
audio in 5.1 DTS-HD MA. Perhaps the bass has been boosted a bit (the
demonstration of the steel shutters packs something of a wallop), but
it doesn't sound especially anachronistic, and the directionality of
the music, dialogue, and effects are all seamless, if gimmicky in the
CinemaScope fashion. Extras return in full from the 2006 DVD but none,
alas, were upgraded to HD. Originally published: September 24, 2010.